Mary Price Harrison.

AuthorParry, Amanda
PositionEnergy/Environment

STATE REPRESENTATIVE GREENSBORO

Career: Bachelor's in history in 1980 from Duke; law degree in '85 from UNC Chapel Hill. She worked at Haley, Bader & Potts law firm in Washington, D.C., helping with MCI's antitrust case that eventually led to the breakup of AT&T.

She's only been a member of the legislature since 2005, but Democrat Pricey Harrison has signed her name to more bills than colleagues with four times her tenure. In the last year and a half, she's sponsored or co-sponsored 828, including a bill to stop Tar Heel energy companies from using coal taken via mountaintop mining techniques, one that requires big-box retailers to recycle plastic bags and another that would ban incandescent light bulbs. Harrison, 50, says she feels a sense of urgency when it comes to the environment. "There's a lot that needs to happen in the policy world, and the amount of time we have to accomplish it is sort of unknown."

She believes it was inevitable she would end up in public service. Her great-grandfather, Julian Price, was a key builder of Jefferson-Pilot and served on the Greensboro City Council. For years, the family had one of the state's largest charitable foundations, the Kathleen Price Bryan Foundation. Family tradition also had a lot to do with her original career choice, communications law...

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